Brian Aldiss' highly inventive space opera is a mind-expanding range of songs and science that takes us, twisting and turning, through a cornucopia of intergalactic merriment and melodrama. Eccentric characters burst into full-throated song with each meandering plot.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
This must be Aldiss' most extreme sci-fi novel. It's utterly mad. Wild and crazy plot, moments of broad farce, operatic interludes and page after page of sheer creative genius. Maybe just a little too insane for 5 stars and maybe not a such great place to start reading Aldiss (whose oeuvre must be just about the most varied of any writer ever), but if you're an Aldiss fan you will love it.
By AJ-99
Format:Paperback
Britain has been blown up and the forces of Capitalism and Communism are undergoing a merger. A handful of idealists gather in a castle by a Balkan lake to plan resistance. The de facto world ruler creates an unassailable power base in a microscopic universe and turns it into a Disney wonderland policed by murderous bunnies. Meanwhile Julliann of the Sharkskin battles the Queen of All Questions beneath a sky that runs with suns. Timeslips precipitate people into the prehistoric past, a hell-raising writer stalks a war criminal through the refugee camps of Mars, and on the tenth planet of the solar system love blooms amid the stratospheric treetops of the hydrogen forests. Characters have back-stories out of Mexican soap-operas on mescaline. Epigrams are exchanged, philosophy soliloquized, and Tito is revealed to have been an Old Etonian. At critical moments, everyone breaks into song.
All in all it is just about the greatest thing since Christ. The wit and invention are unrelenting, the throwaway ideas prodigal. This is what SF is meant to be like. This is what books are meant to be like.
All in all it is just about the greatest thing since Christ. The wit and invention are unrelenting, the throwaway ideas prodigal. This is what SF is meant to be like. This is what books are meant to be like.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2.0 out of 5 stars
4 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Free SF Reader
3 Sep 2007
By Blue Tyson
- Published on Amazon.com
Britain nuked right under.
They weren't the only ones either, plenty of other places copped it, Australian included. This book was set at the end of the 20th century, and with this level of disaster there certainly seemed to be a lot of improbable technology running around for the time period, from holograms, cyborgs, micronauts, people on other planets, just to name a few. Maybe even a bit of mind control. Whackiness of stuff, and whackiness of language.
In other words, this book is really not very good.
They weren't the only ones either, plenty of other places copped it, Australian included. This book was set at the end of the 20th century, and with this level of disaster there certainly seemed to be a lot of improbable technology running around for the time period, from holograms, cyborgs, micronauts, people on other planets, just to name a few. Maybe even a bit of mind control. Whackiness of stuff, and whackiness of language.
In other words, this book is really not very good.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Would _You_ Like to Work an Eighty-Minute Hour?
9 Mar 2013
By Paul Camp
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Brian W. Aldiss's _The Eighty-Minute Hour: A Space Opera_ (1974) is not Aldiss attempting to write classical fare. I know that. I don't expect him to be turning out dazzlers on the order of _Non-Stop_ (1957), _Hothouse_ (1962), _Frankenstein Unbound_ (1973), or _Helliconia Spring_ (1982). Aldiss is certainly allowed to go slumming from time to time, and that is what he does here with this spoof of just about every space opera cliche in the book.
What, then, is the problem? First, the tale is told in a style in which the author is nudging the reader in the ribs all the way through. Second, the events in the story are so bleak and black and dreary, we are in the end impressed more by its darkness than by its humor. The novel does not amuse. Space opera -- even of a tongue-in-cheek variety-- should always amuse or entertain. Aldiss fails this acid test.
What, then, is the problem? First, the tale is told in a style in which the author is nudging the reader in the ribs all the way through. Second, the events in the story are so bleak and black and dreary, we are in the end impressed more by its darkness than by its humor. The novel does not amuse. Space opera -- even of a tongue-in-cheek variety-- should always amuse or entertain. Aldiss fails this acid test.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Weird but worth it if you're capable to keep all the threads together
29 Jun 2011
By Hagman Patrik
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Now, this is one of the weirdest novels I have read. It builds on the same kind of scenario as Frankenstein Unbound i.e. time slips as a result of nuclear war. But this story in infinitely more complex. There are I think five or six parallel stories with different character that only in the very end are connected to each other (think about that, I guess about ten main characters equally important, and you have to read six or seven chapters to find out what happened when the last chapter ended).It is written as a kind of musical comedy, I kid you not, the character repeatedly break out in song! Since time is acting up, there is no simple way to tell the story (like chronological order) so it does get confusing at times.The theme of the book could be said to be a kind of mystery that asks who actually rules the world. It seems that the world is run by computers (the Zeitgeist people should read this), but who runs the computers?
It is also at times almost Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy-level silly, though not as funny IMO. And incredibly thought provoking as well. Aldiss in all his books is fond of alluding to different works of literature etc, but here it at times get absurd (I guess it is because the narrator is far from a neutral observer): I found a joke that you would only get if you are fairly well versed in liturgical terminology.
It does kind of come together in the end, but at times it does feel like a bit too much. So, high marks for ambition, slightly less so for execution. But it is well worth the read.
It is also at times almost Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy-level silly, though not as funny IMO. And incredibly thought provoking as well. Aldiss in all his books is fond of alluding to different works of literature etc, but here it at times get absurd (I guess it is because the narrator is far from a neutral observer): I found a joke that you would only get if you are fairly well versed in liturgical terminology.
It does kind of come together in the end, but at times it does feel like a bit too much. So, high marks for ambition, slightly less so for execution. But it is well worth the read.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
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